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For the last two weeks (basically since the whole tariff conversation kicked-off) I've ve been seeing comments here about how trump is "erratic", "stupid", "illiterate", and a "retard", about how he's going to tank the economy and usher in a new age of Democratic party rule, about how his supporters are all deep-throating cock-slobberes who deserve to loose everything.
I would like to propose an alternative take. What if The Art of The Deal is an accurate reflection of Trump's beliefs and and approach to the world? If that were the case, it would seem that theMotte may be seriously underestimating Donald Trump.
I recently started reading Art of The Deal and I found it interesting to contrast Scott's review of that book with his latest on "The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does" as Trump (or his ghostwriter if you prefer to continue believing that Trump is illiterate) makes a similar but inverse argument.
According to Trump (or Tony Schwartz) one of the key skills of a sucessful negotiator is the ability to remain focused on what is rather than what ought to be, or what people say. Scott alleges in his review that the purpose of a real-estate developer is to lie, and there is a naive "the purpose of a thing is what it does" interpretation where this is plainly true but I don't think Scott gives the Trump/Schwartian position enough credit.
Regardless of it's purported purpose, the "role" of planning boards and zoning laws is to prevent buildings from being built. in orderfor a building to be built the planning board must be thwarted.
Thus the Developer tells the Contractor to start pouring concrete. The planning board is going to approve this project, we're just waiting on the paperwork. The contractor starts pouring. The Developer then goes to the planning board and tells them, you might as well approve this project because we already started work and otherwise you'd have go down to the job-site and tell the Contractor to stop. The planning board approves the project.
Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they? The planning board did in fact approve the project after all. That the contractor beginning to pour without approval played a major part in the granting of approval is either of vital importance or completely irrelevant depending upon which side of the managerial versus working class divide you are sitting.
Another key element of the Trump/Schwartian approach is the idea that there are no "friends" and no "enemies" at the negotiating table. Only people who are willing to negotiate in good faith, and those who are not. People who refuse to negotiate at all are definitionally in the "not" catagory.
Finally, contra Scott, i would hold that rather than being vague and unsatisfying the solution of "find someone who knows more about the issue than I do and pay them to persue my prefered outcome" is sensible and actionable advice.
With these ideas in mind a lot of his allegedly "erratic" and "nonsensical" decisions regarding Tariffs, Zelenskyy, and Immigration start to look less "nonsensical" and more like deliberate tactical choices.
Erratic? Definitely. Stupid? In a sense. Illiterate? No. Retard? By the medical definition, of course not.
I prefer the term "buffoon" myself.
I'm assuming that's supposed to be "cock-slobberers". I wouldn't call all his supporters that, but a decent chunk, roughly about 33-37% of the country certainly are. I'm confident enough in that assertion that I'd be willing to bet money on it, if such a market existed.
There's two big problems with the "4D Chess, Art Of The Deal, Trust The Plan" style of arguments.
It's deployed as yet another everything-proof shield for any of Trump's actions. Trump cultists desperately, desperately want any reason to love the man, so there's an extensive distributed search to come up with any reason to do so. This is just like how woke academics searched for any reason not to blame black people for their own problems, and ended up coming up with unfalsifiable ideas like "structural racism" as the cause for everything. When the motivated reasoning is this blatant, you should be suspicious of the purported results.
Where are the actual results? Trump has already had a full term where he was full of erratic actions. Where are his successes where the erratic behavior clearly led to a good outcome? Note that there are going to be happy accidents every once in a while, so we would expect at least a few good results even if we made an RNG simulator the President. Trump certainly had a few good results during his first term, but they were mostly just him acting like a conventional politician, e.g. Operation Warp Speed (which Trump later disavowed, because of course he did) or his SCOTUS nominations (more of McConnell's victory really, but Trump gets some credit for not buffoonishly sabotaging it in some way).
33-37%/Trump-supporting % of the country = % of Trump supporters that are "deep-throating cock-slobberes" - I'm assuming less than half the country supports Trump, at this point, so "33-37%" is actually 67-80% (before factoring in "the evaporative cooling of group beliefs")
Yes, they've essentially captured the Republican party in its entirety by this point. Criticizing or even disagreeing with Dear Leader too consistently is seen as a crime worthy of (political) death, no matter the topic or how wrong Trump is.
You should read patriots.win. I'm guessing that it is peak MAGA. And yet they engage in lively debates, with comments calling out Donald when he makes mistakes, and getting upvotes.
Criticizing appointments
If only Trump knew ...
Unfortunately, bad appointments has been one of Trump's glaring weak points. 28 upvotes, 12 hours ago
Sure, there's always been a bit of dissent around the fringes (/pol/ has had similar debates). But these people are nowhere close to being in the driver's seat when it comes to MAGA. The tariffs debacle was really the ultimate test, as it was 1) a big policy that 2) affects something almost everyone cares about (the economy) and 3) had a pretty significant flip-flop in a very short timeframe. Basically everyone should have been pissed either when the tariffs were announced, or when the tariffs were significantly watered down.
"Not in the driver's seat" and "political death" are vastly different.
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If, come the 2026 midterm or 2028 presidential elections, the economy was looking decent to strong and there had been significant progress towards any of the following goals; balancing US trade deficiets, restoring US shipbuilding capacity, or peace in Ukraine. Would you update your priors? Or is being an anti-populist such a core component of your identity that you would deny reality to protect your ego?
If the latter, how is your claim that "Trump is a buffoon" any less of a fully general "everything proof" argument?
US shipbuilding capacity isn't going to be restored without first breaking the various unions involved, which isn't going to happen. Even after that you'd need someone who could build things from the ground up -- maybe Musk has someone at Tesla who could do this. But it would probably require hiring a lot of foreign experts, too.
Ukraine seems unlikely to happen due to the intransigence of the parties (in particular Putin, who thinks he can get it all eventually) but if it does I'm sure it will be spun as surrendering to Putin (which it wouldn't be, but Ukraine would lose significant territory)
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Strong economy (which would mean back to trendline without strong inflation, NOT merely a return to positive growth), trade deficit narrowed by a lot (really doesn't matter since the thesis of tariff criticism is that they are bad for the economy so this is fully covered by that item, but the volatility, reputational loss and immediate financial pain needs to not all be for naught), peace in Ukraine with a Ukraine-favoring resolution would make me update my assessment.
US shipbuilding is very "who cares", and I'm not sure how to judge a successful policy since fixing it would take decades of reform. Certainly, having revenue from US gov purchases of ships go up would not count.
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I already give Trump credit for destroying wokeism or at least hastening it's demise. I also gave him credit for announcing a buildup of the military, which is a good idea. Hopefully he actually goes through with it and doesn't waffle.
I don't find balancing US trade deficits to be a priority. Something like reshoring (high tech) manufacturing though, sure.
Yes, it would be great if he could restore US shipbuilding.
Peace in Ukraine is highly contingent on what the peace looks like. If it's effectively "force Ukraine to surrender and give up huge swathes of land that they wouldn't need to if Biden were still around" is not a good peace. If it was "ceasefire at current lines, and Ukraine protected from future invasions by European guarantees", that'd be reasonable.
So that is a "no" then, you would not update your priors.
This is pretty low effort and seems meant only to antagonize and not actually get at the other person's reasoning. Playing gotcha with "I asked you a yes or no question, and you gave me a couple of paragraphs of explanation but didn't say yes or no therefore you didn't answer my question" is obnoxious. If you genuinely believe you still do not have an answer:
Honestly it must be said that these rules are often honored more in the breach than in practice, but this one-liner just stands out as egregiously "ZING! I am not arguing to understand but to score points."
@TheAntipopulist is one of the specific users i had in mind writing the OP.
Their three paragraphs here and replies elsewhere in this thread can be summarized as; "even if the populists are sucessful (which they wont be) it will be for reasons outside thier control and thus not count."
So cutting to the chase, no the anti populist is not going to be updating his priors regarding populism and populists.
With that in mind do you really think they are arguing to understand rather to score points? A large portion of the users' output (along with thier user name) is little more than casual disparagement of anyone outside the managerial class.
Casual disparagement that you are not just tolerating but actively defending from push-back.
All three specify circumstances under which he would update, and some of them aren't even all that demanding. None of them require things outside the government's control or at least not wildly more than your list that he was replying to. Reading "here are three ways I would update" as "I wouldn't update" is... certainly a thing someone said on the Internet today.
Honestly, you're not making much sense. You don't seem to be reading what the words in front of you actually say, but what your opinion of the person posting them leads you to expect to be there.
No they did not specify any circumstances under which they would update, they explained why even if x y and z were to happen they are not high priorities and thus beneath consideration. While there is a throw-away line about giving Trump credit for setting "wokeness" back a bit the possibility that Trump and the people who voted for him might genuinly believe the things they claim to believe is dismissed out of hand.
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I sincerely don't understand how you're coming to that conclusion based on what I wrote.
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Ukraine seems like an obvious example of the success of the "madman" diplomatic style to me. Trump (allegedly) threatened to bomb Russia if Putin invaded [this, as I understand it, would be a big no-no by conventional diplomatic wisdom] and as a result millions of Russians and Ukrainians were spared tremendous pain...for a few years, until Biden and his more conventional and "less erratic" foreign policy took over.
I definitely do not think that Trump is beyond criticism. But I do think that "madman diplomacy" can work – and Trump isn't the first leader to use it effectively.
That's a stretch since Russia didn't invade any country during Obama's first term either. Even if you think Trump really did prevent a war during his first term he didn't do anything substantive to fix any underlying issues, so he just can-kicked.
Are you taking the position that the "little green men" wrre totally not Russian special forces and that anyone who says otherwise is an Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theorist?
Because if not, Georgia, Ukraine and Maldova would all like a word.
No, I agree little green men were Russian. It's just a question of timing. Moldova was in the 90s, Georgia was 2008, Crimea was 2014. None of those happened under Obama's first term, nor Bush 2's first term.
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Not really sure what the first term has to do with it – Russia invaded Ukraine in Obama's second term and successfully annexed Crimea, but that was almost certainly because of intervening events, not because Putin prefers invading in people's second terms (a courtesy he did not extend to Biden).
From a certain perspective all politics is can-kicking. I think that Trump's erratic actions in his first term (threatening to bomb Russia if they invaded Ukraine) led to a good outcome (Ukraine not being invaded). You're right that we can't split the timeline to test a counterfactual, but that's true in all cases, by which logic politicians should never get credit for anything good that happens.
I could be persuaded it was a coincidence if there was good evidence that Putin had an internal clock set to 2023 for some reason (e.g ongoing modernization efforts made Russia much more lethal in 2023 than in 2021) but considering that Trump sent lethal aid to Ukraine, it might have been in Putin's interest to invade even sooner – but he didn't for some reason. At the risk of oversimplifying, I find "Putin being 5% persuaded that Trump might actually strike the Kremlin" a very parsimonious reason.
It's not the fact that it's the first term, it's that Russia's actions don't follow a predictable clock. Blaming Biden for Ukraine being invaded is almost as bad as blaming Trump for COVID happening under his watch. Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts. Maybe Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan slightly helped goad Russia to invade, and maybe Trump's threats might have had some small impact, but they were not the primary determinants by any means.
Not at all. If the debt explodes to 99% of bankruptcy during one leader's term, and the bankruptcy happens under his successor, would we say the first leader was great and only the second one was the issue? Obviously not. The first guy set the powder and lit the fuse, it doesn't really matter if the bomb only went off when he wasn't in charge.
While it's true to some degree that we can't know with perfect accuracy unless we had a time machine that let us rerun the presidency with the alt candidate, some actions are clearer than others, e.g. I doubt if Biden had another term that we'd have a tariff-induced market crash. Maybe Biden could have caused a crash in another way, but Trump owns his own stupid actions in this universe.
I would say Russia is actually relatively reactive on the international stage. However, I don't think Afghanistan had much to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I think that the Biden administration's non-erratic approach to Ukraine policy is more to blame. As we have seen, it was incapable of deterrence.
If you don't think that Trump's threats (which were effectively an informal security guarantee of Ukraine) have any impact, then it seems to me that Ukraine's continual asking for NATO membership or security guarantees is pointless, since "Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts" and they will invade Ukraine regardless of security guarantees. (Put in that light, it kinda seems like NATO is pointless.) Is this your position?
Right, but in your telling, not his smart ones. Deterring Russia is not to his credit, but the stock market crash is.
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Funny, because I do blame both of them for those things.
For Biden: what the fuck else do you think Hunter was doing there? The Ds have been angling for that war for years and have been playing stupid games in Ukraine even back when he was VP.
For Trump: massive partisan riots broke out and weren't controlled. Law and order gave way to burn, loot, murder in literally every major city and he did what, hold a Bible upside down? And the money printing began under him- the Ds continued it, sure, but that was a bad move from the get-go.
The point is you should blame them for the response they had to the event, not the fact that the event happened under their watch. There's not much evidence to say that Biden instigated Russia to invade, and its obviously ludicrous to insinuate that Trump caused COVID.
Hunter was in Ukraine being corrupt. I've not seen any compelling evidence saying he was there to goad Russia to invade.
BLM riots breaking out during Trump's term isn't really Trump's fault. He might have instigated it to some small degree, but it was primarily caused by the high point of woke mania. I agree Trump didn't really respond to it (nor COVID more broadly) well, but that's a separate discussion
If they had the means and opportunity to prevent "the event", it is perfectly reasonable to blame them for the event happening under their watch. Putin is not, in fact, a implacable force of nature.
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